March 22, 2013 AT 10:00 am

We shared a Raspberry Pi care package with the folks over at Metalab (thanks to Marius Kintel for the suggestion!), which is timely because they are right now doing a number of exciting projects with RasPi, including a prototype for an authentication system for their “lazzor,” and a 24×24 RGB matrix with the RasPi as the network interface (strip controlled by a teensy). And the talented Wizard23 created an exciting project that he worked with Overflo to turn into a product for their Hackerspaceshop store! Here’s the beginning of the project documentation over at the Metalab wiki. (And here is the code.)

The WS2801 Bridge for Raspberry Pi is a project developed by wizard23 and produced by overflo.

The metalab received a Raspberry Pi care package from Adafruit, and because we really dig blinky things we made a WS2801 controller for the Raspberry Pi.

It’s a simple shield that you can attach to your Raspberry Pi that functions as a bridge from Raspberry Pi to control a wide variety of WS2801 based LED strips and Pixelmodules at different voltage levels.

You can make your things go blinky from python or C/C++ without the need of a separate microcontroller.

It uses the internal /dev/spi0.0 provided by the Linux Kernel to talk to the Bridgemodule.

And because this is awesome, we made a kit out of it that you can purchase for 10,- on the hackerspaceshop.com